Star Witness

by D. W. Buffa

  We went into the theater in broad daylight and when, two hours later, we came out, it was already dark. I do not know if William Pomeroy, the producer, had been right—I do not know if it was the best picture Mary Margaret Flanders had ever made—but knowing from the opening scene that this was the last time you would see her, the last time you would see her in something new, certainly made it the most memorable. Even when she was standing there, doing nothing, while Walker Bradley or one of the other actors held center stage, you kept watching her, waiting for what she was going to do next. When she dies at the end of the movie, in a scene shot at a distance using a stand-in after Mary Margaret Flanders had been murdered, the effect on the audience was something fiction alone would not have achieved. Though there were only a handful of people in the audience who had actually known her, the grief was real. People were still talking about it as we left the theater.

  Outside, I stood off a ways, waiting while Julie ran up to tell Stanley Roth and the other studio executives gathered round him how much she liked the movie and how well she thought it would do. Just as she reached out to touch his arm, I heard it, that strident, unmistakable voice echoing above the noise of the swirling crowd.

  “You’re a murderer, Stanley Roth. You murdered Mary Margaret and you’re going to pay.”

  I looked around until I found him, shaking his fist in the night, and then doing it all over again when the cameras turned toward him and the reporters came running fast. Tanned and meticulously groomed, dressed in a black tuxedo, Jack Walsh looked like someone who owned a studio of his own.

  Chapter Eleven

  WE LOST A LONG TIME ago the capacity to look at the world directly, seeing things as they are, rather than how they appear to be, refracted through the lens of the categories and conventions invented to explain experience. Still, for most of us, there are moments when, jarred by some accident, some unforeseen misfortune, we start to glimpse something we had not quite seen before and to look at everything else in a different light. Most people put on trial for their life rather quickly acquire a new perspective, one in which the only important question is their own survival. Dr. Johnson’s famous dictum, “Tell a man he’s to be executed in the morning, it concentrates his mind wonderfully,” sums it up perfectly. But, then, Dr. Johnson had never met Stanley Roth.

  After long, tedious weeks selecting a jury, the trial had finally begun. The prosecution had given its opening statement and I had given mine. Of all the other people I had ever defended for murder, I could not think of one who would not have asked what I thought about the way the jury had listened to the prosecution, the way the jury had listened to me. They always asked, they had to ask; they had to know how things stood, what I thought their chances were. Stanley Roth had a question, but it was not that; it was something else, a question no one but Stanley Roth would have thought to ask.

  “Have you ever thought about becoming an actor?” asked Stanley Roth as I settled into what had become my accustomed place in the chair directly in front of his desk.

  It was exactly eight o’clock, the time we started nearly every evening now. We might talk for a few hours or only a few minutes; once or twice we talked halfway through the night; but we always started at eight and we always did it here, in the bungalow where he lived and worked and tried not to think too much about what might happen when the trial was finally over. We met here every evening because the courthouse was a madhouse, full of cameras and reporters, all of them screaming about the public’s right to know and each of them desperate to be the first one to tell. There was no place to go, no place to hide; the only time I could say something to Stanley Roth was in full view of the judge, the jury, and everyone who had fought their way into the courtroom, when I could lean close, my hand over my mouth, and whisper something in his ear.

  Roth bent forward, holding his hands together in front of him. He had a look in his eyes, the narrow shrewdness of the streetwise charlatan who thinks he knows what you want before you do.

  “It wouldn’t be that much of a change,” he went on, amused by the idea. “You’re an actor already. You knew that, though, didn’t you?”

  “I’m not an actor, Stanley,” I protested. “What I do is real.”

  Roth flashed a quick, dismissive smile. “Everyone is an actor, Antonelli. Everyone.”

  The pressure he was under had begun to take its toll. The circles under his eyes, barely noticeable when I first met him, had become dark, permanent shadows. His hands had begun to shake at odd times and for no apparent reason. His voice would now sometimes break in the middle of a sentence, and his speech would all of a sudden speed up like someone with a lot to say who is afraid of running out of time.

  “You say you’re not an actor; that what you do is real. But that opening statement I saw you make this afternoon went on for more than two hours and you never once referred to a note. Did all those smooth flowing sentences, all those well-organized paragraphs just come off the top of your head? You had to have spent ... what? Days, weeks, working on that speech—drafting it, revising it, reworking it, memorizing it—learning it by heart until you could give it backward in your sleep. You’re not an actor? You’re one of the best I’ve ever seen!”

  Roth paused and stroked his chin. He studied me through half-closed eyes as if he had been called upon to render a professional opinion about something on which he had unquestioned authority.

  “I think you have a tendency to be a bit too formal at times. And that thing you do with your left hand ... You know, when you have your right hand shoved into your pants pocket. You wave it around a little too much. Like this,” he said as he flapped his hand in a loose, exaggerated manner. “Tighten it up a bit; make it more emphatic. Use it to underscore the words. Anyway, that’s my take on it,” he said, looking vaguely around the room, “for whatever it might be worth.”

  Slouching back against the chair, Roth put the palms of his hands on the seams of his pants, lifted his head to one side and looked at me with curious eyes.

  “Really. How long did it take you to put that together—that opening statement you made?”

  With a careless shrug and a halfhearted shake of my head, I dismissed the importance of what I had done in order to avoid discussing it. He had come close enough as it was.

  “I didn’t mean you were like an actor in the movies,” he remarked; “more like an actor on the stage.”

  He folded his arms across his chest and moved his head farther to the side, an amused look on his face.

  “Anyone can be a movie actor; not everyone can work on stage... . Mary Margaret had a hard time remembering two lines at a time; she could never have learned a whole script. But it didn’t matter—it doesn’t matter when you’re making a movie ... most of it is visual, anyway. All she had to do was memorize a few words... . We could keep shooting the scene until we got it right. But on stage! No, it would have been impossible.”

  He got to his feet, hesitated, and then slapped his hand hard on the corner of the desk. The sound of it was like the beat of a drum. He seemed to feed off it. His voice became more urgent, more insistent.

  “Actors who do both always tell you they prefer the stage. They like working in front of a live audience. There is an energy about it, a passion they can’t get when it is just them and the camera.”

  He stared through the window into the blue ambiguous night. I thought he had forgotten what he was trying to say; but then, suddenly, he wheeled around. He chopped the air with his left hand, doing it the way he had said I should.

  “It’s immediate. They live in the moment. They speak the words, play their part; they know while they’re saying it they’re the center of attention. They feel the response. It isn’t their imagination, it’s physical—you can feel it.”

  He looked at me sharply. “You felt it today, didn’t you? When you were telling them what happened that night—how Mary Margaret was murdered while I was sleeping in the other room. I could tell you felt it. The look you ha
d on your face—the scorn, the disdain—and your voice dripping contempt—when you said that the prosecution’s case made sense only if I had set out to frame myself; when you insisted nobody could be so stupid... .”

  Roth paused as if he had just remembered something. He lifted an eyebrow and looked at me.

  “When you insisted nobody would ever have produced a picture in which the killer was so stupid as to murder his wife, go to all the trouble of getting rid of the weapon and then just casually drop his bloodstained clothes in the laundry hamper and go back to bed. That was an interesting touch. Something spur of the moment?”

  “I wouldn’t say spur of the moment, exactly,” I mumbled.

  “That’s when you started to feel it, though, wasn’t it? That’s when you knew you had them, wasn’t it?” he asked, keeping after me, certain he was right. “And not just the jury—everyone in the courtroom.”

  With a flash of intuition, Stanley Roth saw things in a new perspective.

  “An actor—an actor on the stage—learns his lines, lines written by someone else, and speaks them over and over again, in every performance. Sometimes it goes on for years, the same play, the same part, the same lines, night after night. You write your own lines—or make them up on the spot,” he added with a taunting glance as he began to walk back and forth. “You wrote the ones you gave today, though, didn’t you?” he asked, peering at me from under his brow as he continued to pace nervously.

  “I sketched out some of what I was going to say.”

  His smile told me he did not believe me. He was certain I had written it all out and then memorized every word of it. In the literal sense, he was wrong; but I did nothing to correct him. There were things he did not need to know.

  “You perform it only once; and each time you do it— make an opening statement—you do it with a different audience, a different jury.”

  With a few quick steps he came back to the desk and dropped into the chair. One hand thrown lazily over the side, he sank into the opposite corner and, with his elbow on the arm, rested his chin on the heel of his hand. His eyes, moving languidly from a point somewhere above my shoulder, came to rest on mine; then, stirred by some other thought, moved back again. He removed his hand from under his chin. Unfolding his fingers, he gestured in a vague, desultory fashion into the distance.

  “You’re an actor who writes his own lines for a play that never has more than one performance. But you always play the same part, don’t you?” asked Roth, his eyes, moving slower than his words, coming back to mine at the very end of the question. “Always the trial lawyer— or, rather, the defense attorney—pleading with your audience ... that jury—each time twelve different people; but always twelve people you don’t know, an audience of strangers—to do what you tell them is the right thing to do, though you know—don’t you?—that sometimes it isn’t the right thing at all. How do you do that? An actor has his lines—the lines of the play, the fiction being performed. But you—you have the lines you’ve written about something real, something that happened; and you’re trying to convince the audience not just to enjoy the performance; not just to applaud how well you acted, how entertaining it has all been... . No, you want them to do something, to act, to decide whether one man, the defendant, your client, the man you represent, did or did not commit murder. The actor goes home after the play, satisfied with how well he has performed. How do you go home? Satisfied with your performance? Pleased with yourself if you’ve gotten your audience to do the right thing—or the wrong thing?”

  He saw the look of anger in my eyes, the look I could not quite conceal, and it drove him on. He jumped forward, both arms on the desk and stared hard at me.

  “Doesn’t it bother you that you’ve learned how to act so well that you can persuade your audience to let a killer go free?”

  “You mean, will it bother me if I convince this jury to let you go free?” I shot back.

  “I knew you didn’t believe me,” he replied with an irritating sense of vindication; “that deep down you still thought I was guilty. I’m not, but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter to you. That is what I did not understand before: that you don’t care one way or the other. It doesn’t change what you do, does it? It doesn’t change how you feel about it. Because,” he went on, that same shrewd look in his eye he had before, the look that told you he thought he knew your weakness and how to use it, “the only thing that matters to you—the whole reason you do this—the reason you love this—is the performance after all, isn’t it? Isn’t that the truth of it? You’re an actor after all—a great actor—and like every great actor you become intoxicated with your own performance.”

  “You think everything is a performance; you think everyone is an actor. You don’t understand the first thing about what I do,” I protested as I got out of the chair. I was tired of looking at him; I was tired of the way he thought he could put everything in categories of his own choosing, as if nothing existed unless he could first see it the way it would look on a screen. I stood at the open French doors, listening to the sound of a car pulling away from the studio lot below; the muffled voices of two women walking toward the gate, maybe two actresses— bit players—on their way home after a long day of shooting somewhere on the back lot; the low murmur of traffic from a highway a mile or so away. Everywhere the sound of normal life, or what we thought of as normal life, lived out beyond the edges of Blue Zephyr and its manufactured dreams.

  “I’m not an actor,” I said, turning around. “And I’m not—at least I hope I’m not—intoxicated with my own performance. But neither am I some cardboard character going through the motions, reciting the shopworn phrases about reasonable doubt and the questionable credibility of witnesses. I believe—really believe—in what I’m saying. That’s the difference. I’m not reading lines; I’m not playing a part. I’m arguing a case. That’s what I like about what I do: the argument.”

  “The argument?” asked Roth, confused.

  Holding his hands together in his lap, he began to rub his fingers together as he waited with some impatience for me to explain. He had already decided what he thought; he was not really interested in hearing more about it from me.

  “The argument,” I repeated, jabbing the air with my left hand. “That is what a case is—civil, criminal, it doesn’t matter—an argument about what the law is and what the facts are. You think I care about the defendant? You think I care what happens to him? You’re right— most of them are guilty, most of them did what they’re accused of doing.”

  I moved a step closer and fixed him with a stare.

  “What do you think I have in common with most of the people I defend? Do you think I became a defense lawyer out of some public-minded democratic belief in the essential equality of everyone, whether the wisest, most honorable man I ever met, or some depraved bloodthirsty lunatic who would rape your mother and kill your father and not think twice about making you watch?”

  Roth moved his head to one side, then the other, looking at me first from one angle, one perspective, then another.

  “It isn’t very often I lose sleep over what is going to happen to the defendant if I lose; I’m not losing any sleep over what might happen to you. I only worry that I might miss something, leave something out, forget something that could make the difference between winning the argument and losing the argument. That’s what I worry about; not whether you’re going to prison for the rest of your life, or whether you’re going to wind up face to face with the executioner... .”

  Roth had moved his chair a few inches to the right, toward the side of my face hit by the lamp light.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, annoyed. He shook his head, signaling that he did not want to be interrupted as he considered something.

  “That’s good,” he said finally; “that anger. Not many people can do that—create the impression of genuine anger, real indignation. I saw a little of that this afternoon—in your opening; but this ... this was good. You’re a n
atural. Tell me this, though,” he continued, sitting upright, stroking his small chin. “That business when we were picking a jury... ”

  “Voir dire,” I said automatically, bewildered at the effect, or rather, the lack of effect my outburst had had on him.

  He was impossible. Everything was a movie; everything some kind of act. I could have pointed a gun at him, and he would have thought only about how I should be holding it to make it look really authentic.

  “Forget voir dire. I’m not an actor. This is not a picture show. There has never been a movie that comes close to what at the heart of it a trial—a murder trial—is all about. Orson Welles might have been able to do it,” I added, willing to wound his vanity if that was the only way to get his attention. “He might have understood it: the way the argument works. He might have understood the way you have to take each fact and connect it with all the others; the way you have to make each point follow effortlessly, inexorably, from the one before it. Welles might have understood the way you try to take apart the argument on the other side, the argument by which the prosecution tries to convince that same jury—that same audience— that the facts, the evidence, proves conclusively—beyond that reasonable doubt—that the defendant is guilty. Yes,” I said as if I was now convinced of it, “Orson Welles might have understood it: the way you take their argument and show how it doesn’t prove guilt at all; that it proves instead—those same facts, that same evidence—that there is a reason to doubt, a reason serious people, people who take the law seriously, have to find the defendant not guilty; and do it, no matter how certain they are themselves that though they could not prove it the way they were supposed to prove it, the prosecution was right: the defendant was guilty, guilty as hell; guilty, guilty any way you can think, except by that one unimpeachable standard. That, Mr. Roth, is the argument. That’s what I do. I make the argument. And if that argument helps you or anyone else—fine; and if it doesn’t ... Well, as I said before, I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.”